Citywide Celebration Of Playwright Mfoniso Udofia's 'Ufot Family Cycle' Launches This Fall

Greater Boston theatre companies and collaborative partners gathered at Boston’s City Hall today, Tuesday, June 25, 2024, to announce major plans for an ambitious two-year, citywide celebration of the Ufot Family Cycle, a cycle of nine plays about three generations of a Nigerian American family by Massachusetts-raised, visionary playwright Mfoniso Udofia.

The far-ranging list of collaborative partners brings together arts institutions, universities, social organizations, non-profits, and a host of community activation partners across Greater Boston, who will collaborate on the creation and public activation of the cycle. Partners currently include AfroDesiaCity, ArtsEmerson, The Barr Foundation, Boston Arts Academy, The Boston Foundation, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston Public Art Triennial, Boston Public Library, Boston Public Schools, Boston University, Central Square Theater, Coolidge Corner Theater, DiasporaMass, Embrace Boston, Facing History & Ourselves, Front Porch Arts Collective, GBH, The Huntington, Kligerman Productions, The Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, Next Chapter Podcasts, Nigerian Professionals Group, Northeastern University, Prior Performing Arts Center at the College of the Holy Cross, Roxbury Community College, Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation, Wellesley College, Wellesley Repertory Theatre, West End House, Wheelock Family Theatre, and ZUMIX, with others to be announced in the coming months.

All nine plays in the cycle will be fully produced, beginning this fall at The Huntington with its productions of the first play Sojourners, the origin story of the matriarch of the family, and the second play, The Grove, in February of 2025; the following 7 plays of the cycle will be produced by a series of arts organizations and community partners over the next two years through the summer of 2026. Boston’s Ufot Family Cycle includes premieres of five of the plays and marks the first time that the cycle will be experienced in its entirety and in Udofia’s intended order, representing a major collaborative project with an expansive scale and scope not imagined elsewhere in the country and only made possible in Boston.

Each of the nine plays will have community activation partners – a unique cohort that brings together disparate segments of Boston’s arts and culture sector to collaborate in new ways, both lifting and generating audiences for the artistic work itself and imagining a new model for institutional collaboration with portals for access to artmaking, civic transformation, and education for all ages.

Four of the plays (Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau, and In Old Age) have been previously produced to great acclaim at theatres including New York Theatre Workshop, The Playwrights Realm, Magic Theatre, and American Conservatory Theatre. Udofia’s plays have been called “extraordinary” by The New York Times, which writes that they “offer a moving and powerful corrective to the notion that what immigrants leave behind is always awful, and that what they find is always worth the trip.” New York Theater called them an “enlightening and binge-worthy family saga that updates the story of immigrant America.”

The Ufot Family Cycle represents a profound investment in an artist of great vision, humanity, and humor. Huntington Theatre Artistic Director Loretta Greco envisioned this city-wide festival celebrating Udofia’s work and describes it as “a commitment to cultural aspiration of the highest caliber with the sincere intention of making great art which pushes the culture forward, challenging and revitalizing the American canon.”

Greco continues: “At the same time, the Ufot Family Cycle is a wonderfully crazy experiment – a test balloon for exploring our relationship to risk and the power and complexity of both collaboration and community activation over time. What does it mean to activate an entire city with a unique diaspora story, a story of who we are that unfolds in 9 parts, neighborhood to neighborhood over 24 months? What do we learn from disrupting the way we normally do things to invite a host of unexpected partners to co-create the art and amplify the conversation around that art from all walks of life across many sectors?  My hope is along the way we can create a new paradigm towards working together to get big, messy, aspirational things done.” 

INSPIRATION FOR THE UFOT FAMILY CYCLE

When nationally acclaimed playwright Mfoniso Udofia grew up in Southbridge, Massachusetts and attended Wellesley College, she rarely saw stories about Africans and African Americans that felt like her family. Inspired in part by August Wilson’s Century Cycle, she set out to create an emotionally engrossing cycle of nine plays that follows one Nigerian American family through three generations: parents, children, grandchildren. Each play stands alone brilliantly, yet together forms a stunning tapestry that will resonate with everyone.

"I'm writing these plays for myself, for my immediate family, for my extended family, for the Ibibio community,” says Udofia. “I'm writing us — so we can see us. I believe my work incites community action. When one cares about a character so much they are crying for them, they usually cannot meet a similar person in life and instantaneously judge them. A dramatic telling of an immigrant story, when done well, can cause an audience to change irrevocably in the moment. These audience members will then leave the building and enter their own communities with newfound empathy."

Mfoniso's own experience informs the Cycle as her parents immigrated to Texas from Nigeria in the 1970s, had children, and then moved to the Boston area because of the educational opportunities available. Udofia’s mother was a biologist, and her father was a scholar of West African studies. Mfoniso went to Wellesley College, during which time she had her first experience with The Huntington through her Africana Studies class when Professor Selwyn R. Cudjoe took students to see Gem of the Ocean and introduced her to playwright August Wilson (1945-2005). To see herself onstage, reflected in Wilson's ten-play American Century Cycle, with each set in a different decade of the 20th century about Black American life, was influential years before she would pursue her career in playwriting and return to Wellesley as a faculty member of the Albright Institute.

The New York Times states, "While building empathy is important to Ms. Udofia, as she continues to work on the rest of the ‘Ufot’ plays, she is also unapologetic about the fact that she isn't writing the Cycle for a traditional theatre audience." Mfoniso spoke about this during several Boston community meetings in 2023, stating her intentions to be an active participant in meeting community members where they are to inform the making of the remaining Cycle plays.  

ABOUT PRODUCING THE FULL UFOT FAMILY CYCLE IN BOSTON

When Artistic Director Loretta Greco joined The Huntington in 2022, she brought with her a longstanding partnership and friendship with Mfoniso Udofia, and a vision for producing the complete Ufot Family Cycle in the Boston area. Greco previously produced the premieres of three of Mfoniso’s plays – Sojourners, runboyrun, and In Old Age – while helming San Francisco’s Magic Theatre.

Over the past 2 years, The Huntington has hosted salons and gatherings to build a coalition of partnering artists and organizations, in addition to hosting writing residencies and many workshops to develop work in the cycle. In fall 2024, the nine-play Cycle will kick off with The Huntington’s productions of Sojourners (followed by The Grove in 2025). The Huntington will also serve as a motherboard of resources and connection to bolster the creative process and success of the remaining seven productions that will be mounted through 2026 by and with arts organizations, universities, social organizations, non-profits, and a host of community activation partners.

Each of the productions will be professionally filmed by partner Kligerman Productions in order to expand the reach of the project and preserve it in perpetuity, allowing the Ufot Family Cycle to be taught in educational settings as part of the American theatrical canon.

The Ufot Family Cycle has received support from The Barr Foundation, The Boston Foundation, and the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation, as well as theMayor’s Office of Arts and Culture in the City of Boston.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Mfoniso Udofia, a first-generation Nigerian American storyteller and educator, attended Wellesley College and obtained her MFA from the American Conservatory Theater (ACT). While at ACT, she co-pioneered The Nia Project which provided artistic outlets for San Francisco youth. 

Productions of her plays Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau, and In Old Age have been seen at New York Theatre Workshop, American Conservatory Theater, Playwrights Realm, Magic Theater, National Black Theatre, Strand Theater Company (MD), and Boston Court. She received the 2021 Horton Foote Award, the 2017 Helen Merrill Playwright Award, the 2017-18 McKnight National Residency and Commission, and is a member of New Dramatists.

She is currently commissioned by The Huntington, Hartford Stage, Denver Center, ACT, and South Coast Repertory. Her plays have been developed by Manhattan Theatre Club, ACT, McCarter Theatre, OSF, New Dramatists, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, Hedgebrook, Sundance, Space on Ryder Farm, and more. 

Since 2018, Mfoniso has been working extensively in television; she has worked on such acclaimed shows as 13 Reasons Why on Netflix, A League of Their Own on Amazon, Let the Right One In on Showtime, and Pachinko (Peabody Award), Little America, and Lessons in Chemistry (WGA Nomination) all on Apple TV+. She also has developed films for HBO, Legendary, and Amazon.

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